Mike Huckabee Wonders Why Sarah Palin Gets So Much Attention (And NPR Pimps Gomer)

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who had a good run during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries before Sen. John McCain went on to win the nomination, is thought by some in the White House to be the likely GOP nominee.

But he hasn't been getting the kind of excited frequent media attention of Sarah Palin and this has apparently begun to bother him.

According to Politico.com which interviewed Huckabee, he expressed some consternation:

“The polls are consistently favorable, putting me either at the top of every poll or right near it. It’s hard to ignore that, having swum in that water before when I barely registered in those very kinds of polls,” he said...

... “She’s brought an enormous amount of energy to the party. As to why she seemingly draws ten times the attention, I don’t know,” he said, touting recent book signings of his that had drawn up to 1,400 people, with no note in the media.

“You’re never going to read that. I’m never going to be breaking news because I made a comment on Twitter and Facebook. Why is that? I don’t know,” he said.

Even so, Huckabee could be Obama's worst nightmare which might explain why some in the White House are thinking he will be the nominee.

As the New York Times' Peter Baker reported in a New York Times magazine piece right after the election:

They doubt Sarah Palin will run and figure Mitt Romney cannot get the Republican nomination because he enacted his own health care program in Massachusetts. If they had to guess today, some in the White House say that Obama will find himself running against Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor.

In contrast with the president's urbane coolness, Huckabee emanates folksiness from his pores. While Obama can seem distant, Huckabee has an everyman quality.

As a white southern male and the former governor of Arkansas, he would have wide appeal not just in the South.

He could make it harder for Obama to win the independent men who helped put Obama over the top in 2008.

Huckabee could make it even more difficult than the economy is likely to make it, for Obama to put together the electoral map of 2008.

North Carolina, for instance, would be a heavier lift for the president. So, too, would battleground states with large rural and suburban swaths like like Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama could try to marginalize Huckabee as a former governor without experience on the world stage.

But if the unemployment situation hasn't changed substantially, and there aren't many economists who think that it will have, the economy is likely to be the top issue, negating Obama's foreign-affairs advantage.

Also, it's worth remembering that approach didn't work for the last sitting president, George H.W. Bush who found himself running against a folksy Arkansas governor in 1992.

Meanwhile, as a former practicing preacher, Huckabee talks the talk of evangelical Christians. If many Americans have doubts about Obama's Christianity, they'll have very little doubt about Huckabee's.

Politico suggests Huckabee's building of a $3 million home on the Florida Gulf Coast could be an impediment to a presidential run since he'll need to make a lot of money to pay his $2.8 million mortgage. He may want to keep his Fox News Channel contract as well as his lucrative speaking gigs, the thinking goes.

But the Florida house could actually work for Huckabee. It could enhance his stature in Florida, helping him in his effort to win not just the Republican primary there but, if he were to become the nominee, the state's electoral votes.

Just exactly where are these legions of Huck fans. The Huckster is being kept afloat by the ballast of the Democrat sponsored PPP polls and puff pieces from Dem agitprop outlets like NPR, Politico and the Washington (Com)Post. He isn’t tied with Sarah Palin. In a GOP primary with Palin, he would liquefy like lard hitting the frying pan. She would destroy him just on the basis of her far superior political skills, charisma and character, but inevitably, his pardons and big government nannystatism (which the MSM has blacked out for no, so much do they want to promote him) would get great scrutiny and he would quickly sink to an asterisk.

He was a player in 2008 against a bunch of nobody losers and lazies. He flew under the radar screen for nearly the whole campaign and got little to no scrutiny. This time, he would be filleted over the pardon issue, slit from belly to brisket.

And Sarah Palin ain’t Fred Thompson or McCain or even Rudy.....she is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Come on in Huck. I for one would be happy to see her dispatch you and your traveling medicine show.

It is not just that he is soft on crime, Onyx. Huckabee’s commitment to prolife issues is not rock solid either, and this is not widely known.

Huckabee bragged about putting a liberal judge, Lavenski R. Smith, on the Arkansas Supreme Court, and getting him Promoted to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (one level below the Supreme Court. Smith has not only been soft on criminals on search and seizure issues, and pro-quota on racial issues, BUT HAS VOTED TO ALLOW POLICE TO CENSOR SIGNS OF PEACEFUL PROLIFE DEMONSTRATORS ON PUBLIC PROPERTY IF THE POLICE DEEM THEM OFFENSIVE!!:

From an interview on August 3, 2007 outlining hte type of judge he favored:

Governor Huckabee: You know, I looked for people who embodied those very things I just mentioned. A commitment to a strict constructionist view of their job, viewed the Constitution as something that they were simply to apply, not to reinterpret and rewrite. But I also looked for people who embodied the kind of temperament that we needed on the bench, who would, uh, divorce themselves and distance themselves from their own personal passions in the sense of letting their emotions drive them, but [instead] letting the Constitution drive them. And, uh, the kind of people I appointed certainly ended up, uh, for example, one I can think of, that I put on the State Supreme Court…President Bush appointed him to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. An outstanding young jurist named Lavenski Smith that I’ve known since I was in grade school. And he’s a person that embodies the kind of person we need on the bench, he, uh, has a deep respect for God, for this country and its Constitution, and, uh, almost approaches his job with a sense of fear and trembling, to make sure that he does it in such a way that he has a clear conscience.

What kind of judge is Lavenski Smith? In a critique of his record on the Arkansas Supreme Court, Before Huckabee secured his appointment to the federal appeals court, the Bench and Bar of Minnesota, the official publication of the Minnesota State Bar Association said the following:

“Since joining the court, Judge Smith has authored approximately 100 majority opinions, two concurring opinions, and seven dissenting opinions. His opinions appear to place him slightly to the left of center on the court ideologically, but with some unpredictability. He has dissented three times in search-and-seizure cases, each time taking the position that investigating officers did not comply with the 4th Amendment. He also joined an en banc dissent favoring the suppression of a criminal defendant’s confession on the ground it was involuntary. In employment discrimination cases, he has written a dissenting opinion to oppose a remittitur from $200,000 to $10,000,10 and he has joined in an en banc dissent that took the position that an employee could prove a claim of race discrimination in a promotion even though he never formally applied for the position.”

On the Eighth Circuit, he has continued as a moderate liberal according to conservative legal commentator Hans Bader at the Scotus blog:

“Lavenski Smith has turned out to be ever-so- slightly left-of-center on the Eighth Circuit, left of that Circuit’s center on race discrimination claims, and willing to uphold some restrictions on anti-abortion signs (that latter fact is surprising given his pre-judicial litigation work with the Rutherford Institute). Despite his once conservative background, he now seems to be a moderate with some liberal tendencies.”

In the abortion case, Frye v. Kansas City Mo. Police Department,375 F.3d 785 (8thCir. 2004), Judge Smith joined the other liberals on the court in voting to allow police to arrest peaceful prolife demonstrators assembled on public property and to effectively censor their prolife signs, with impunity, if the police deemed the contents of the signs to be offensive.

Do the evangelicals in Iowa know that, if they vote for Huckabee, this is the kind of judge they would get?

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